When sedentary people mix with bedouin people in the desert or travel with them on a journey, they depend on them. They cannot do anything for themselves without them. This is an observed fact. Their dependence extends to the knowledge of the country, the right directions, watering places, and crossroads.
-Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima, Book 2.5
They do not call Ibn Khaldun the Father of Sociology for nothing. Without this insight about city dwellers needing to rely on the bedouins’ desert skills in order to stay alive, I wonder if Thorstein Veblen would have written The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he gives the example of urban idlers with such excess time on their hands that they engage in primitive forms of travel simply in order to amuse themselves.